Occupy Wall Street Quotes

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they've been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.

..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.

Before you go out and occupy Wall Street, occupy your own brain!

We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

...If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model - Banks, Debt, and Money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings...

Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.” 2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone recieved the news with pleasure. Several said, "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead." Then there was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise... There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, "What can we do now?" How can we go on without him?" In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, mo matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror....we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

the Occupy Wall Street Movement, as a reaction to the global debt crisis. Again, as is characteristic of Left-wing analysis, the vague demands are for a ‘redistribution of wealth’, through taxation or confiscation, with little or no thought given to the workings of the global banking system.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive

According to the study of human psychology, human behavior is determined, in part, by incentives and decentives.

An extreme—not to say absurd—version of the “two Americas” is the “1% versus the 99%” fantasy cooked up by the “Occupy Wall Street” radicals. In

Listen in close, Wall Street Conquistadors, you’re spreading like vapor up through people’s floors, you’re moving en masse under the cracks of our doors and grabbing our children to work in your stores, feeding the needy to make them your whores, but you need to remember the grave you’re digging is yours.

In 1999, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin’s Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street.

We believe that today's younger generation, who started a global movement by camping out on Wall Street and its equivalents around the world and who are often choosing a road less traveled rather than joining the military-industrial-academic-prision complex–these people are prophets in our midst.

When the world is mine, then you all will be the 99.9%.

President Obama, inciter-in-chief, regularly used violent rhetoric to gin up the Democrats: ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.’ He supported the most violent, seditious movements of 21st-century America (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Muslim Brotherhood groups, to name a few), while directing the Department of Homeland Security to track ‘right-wing extremists’—in other words, Americans like you and me.

Walking back home that afternoon, I felt more aware of the poverty and opulence on every sidewalk—we brushed past a raven-haired lady with a thousand-dollar handbag and a skinny child with toeless shoes begging for change.

In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.

This protest spoke to me—the humanist principles felt connected to the minimalist essence of long-distance hiking, the desire to transcend the smoke and mirrors of our country’s established society, revealing what remains in all its splendor: the magnificent, resilient human soul.

On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. This is a major theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I visited in October 2011 (see figure 7.5).17 On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).

I began a new project: a photo-essay about the Occupy Wall Street movement that was overtaking Manhattan. Inspired, I snapped hundreds of photographs, wanting to document this singular moment in New York’s pulsing body, watching people flooding the sidewalks like human rivers, converging at the green park as one ocean. I took shots of the sharpest signs and strangest masks; the angry bankers in their crisp blue button-downs; the lines of bored-faced cops, slouching with thick arms crossed. And peering through my viewfinder, I learned the skill of noticing more deeply; I felt a thrill—a new civil affinity budding in my dreams and in the brick-and-mortar city, simultaneously: that we, the people, were awakening to the truth that a bundle of twigs is inconceivably strong.

Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose—picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves “Halliburton Inc.” Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight.

In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That

Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being. Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.

Obviously, the violence suppression of social movements is hardly new. One need only think of the Red Scare, the reaction to radical labor movements like the IWW, let alone the campaigns of outright assassination directed against the American Indian Movement or black radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in almost every case, the victims were either working-class or nonwhite. On the few occasions where even much milder systematic repression is directed at any significant number of middle-class white people--as during the McCarthy era, or against student protesters during the Vietnam War--it quickly becomes a national scandal. And, while it would be wrong to call Occupy Wall Street a middle-class white people’s movement--it was much more divers than that--there is no doubt that very large numbers of middle-class white people were involved in it. Yet the government did not hesitate to attack it, often using highly militarized tactics, often deploying what can only be called terroristic violence--that is, if "terrorism" is defined as attacks on civilians consciously calculated to create terror for political ends. (I know this statement might seem controversial. But when Los Angeles police, for example, open fire with rubber bullets on a group of chalk-wielding protesters engaged in a perfectly legal, permitted "art walk," in an obvious attempt to teach citizens that participating in any Occupy-related activity could lead to physical injury, it’s hard to see how that word should not apply.) (p. 141-142)

The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, which invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb: a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant, in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200. Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon during the suicide attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Three were carried out by Christians.

Meanwhile, a month after the Bitcoin conference, protesters took over Zuccotti Park in Manhattan and began what became known as Occupy Wall Street, taking aim at the government’s decision to bail out the big banks but not the rest of the population. The Bitcoin forum was full of people talking about their experiences visiting Zuccotti Park and other Occupy encampments around the country to advertise the role that a decentralized currency could play in bringing down the banks.

Occupy Wall Street and the Free State Project were ostensibly leaderless organizations that eschewed new power hierarchies.

The idea that a story or the mobilization of a bunch of stories is futile flies in the face of everything we now about the history of social movements in the United States. The Labor Movement, the Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, the LGBT Movement, the movement to Occupy Wall Street--all of these social transformations & the legislation they inspired were sparked & carried on at particular moments by tales of unrest, resistance & desire that were somehow documented & shared widely.

But by her second campaign, Hillary had spent four years traveling the world, meeting with the likes of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon—a long way from Rochester. Hillary seemed like Rip van Winkle, awoken after a seven-year slumber to find a vastly different country. She’d missed the rise of the Tea Party. She’d missed the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rage over health care and bank bailouts and the 1 percent.

no text is neutral.

Perhaps Chalaby put it best when he argued that “journalism is not only an invention of the market economy, but…the narrative form that capitalism took to become a historical force.

Dans son rapport inaugural, le Forum, à propos de la mondialisation qu'il a symbolisée sous ses formes les plus conquérantes et sûres d'elles-mêmes, évoque avec un sens exquis de l'euphémisme "un risque de désillusion". Mais dans les conversations, c'est autre chose. Désillusion ? Crise ? Inégalités ? D'accord, si vous y tenez, mais enfin, comme nous le dit le très cordial et chaleureux PDG de la banque américaine Western Union, soyons clairs : si on ne paie pas les leaders comme ils le méritent, ils s'en iront voir ailleurs. Et puis, capitalisme, ça veut dire quoi ? Si vous avez 100 dollars d'économies et que vous les mettez à la banque en espérant en avoir bientôt 105, vous êtes un capitaliste, ni plus ni moins que moi. Et plus ces capitalistes comme vous et moi (il a réellement dit "comme vous et moi", et même si nous gagnons fort décemment notre vie, même si nous ne connaissons pas le salaire exact du PDG de la Western Union, pour ne rien dire de ses stock-options, ce "comme vous et moi" mérite à notre sens le pompon de la "brève de comptoir" version Davos), plus ces capitalistes comme vous et moi, donc, gagneront d'argent, plus ils en auront à donner, pardon à redistribuer, aux pauvres. L'idée ne semble pas effleurer cet homme enthousiaste, et à sa façon, généreux, que ce ne serait pas plus mal si les pauvres étaient en mesure d'en gagner eux-mêms et ne dépendaient pas des bonnes dispositions des riches. Faire le maximum d'argent, et ensuite le maximum de bien, ou pour les plus sophistiqués faire le maximum de bien en faisant le maximum d'argent, c'est le mantra du Forum, où on n'est pas grand-chose si on n'a pas sa fondation caritative, et c'est mieux que rien, sans doute "(vous voudriez quoi ? Le communisme ?"). Ce qui est moins bien que rien, en revanche, beaucoup moins bien, c'est l'effarante langue de bois dans laquelle ce mantra se décline. Ces mots dont tout le monde se gargarise : préoccupation sociétale, dimension humaine, conscience globale, changement de paradigme… De même que l'imagerie marxiste se représentait autrefois les capitalistes ventrus, en chapeau haut de forme et suçant avec volupté le sang du prolétariat, on a tendance à se représenter les super-riches et super-puissants réunis à Davos comme des cyniques, à l'image de ces traders de Chicago qui, en réponse à Occupy Wall Street, ont déployé au dernier étage de leur tour une banderole proclamant : "Nous sommes les 1%". Mais ces petits cyniques-là étaient des naïfs, alors que les grands fauves qu'on côtoie à Davos ne semblent, eux, pas cyniques du tout. Ils semblent sincèrement convaincus des bienfaits qu'ils apportent au monde, sincèrement convaincus que leur ingénierie financière et philanthropique (à les entendre, c'est pareil) est la seule façon de négocier en douceur le fameux changement de paradigme qui est l'autre nom de l'entrée dans l'âge d'or. Ça nous a étonnés dès le premier jour, le parfum de new age qui baigne ce jamboree de mâles dominants en costumes gris. Au second, il devient entêtant, et au troisième on n'en peut plus, on suffoque dans ce nuage de discours et de slogans tout droit sortis de manuels de développement personnel et de positive thinking. Alors, bien sûr, on n'avait pas besoin de venir jusqu'ici pour se douter que l'optimisme est d'une pratique plus aisée aux heureux du monde qu'à ses gueux, mais son inflation, sa déconnexion de toute expérience ordinaire sont ici tels que l'observateur le plus modéré se retrouve à osciller entre, sur le versant idéaliste, une indignation révolutionnaire, et, sur le versant misanthrope, le sarcasme le plus noir. (p. 439-441)

That opposition is politically and ideologically diverse. Alaa and his comrades are part of the left, internationalist, anti-sectarian, youth-led movement that is part of a global confrontation with transnational capital and its national organs, a movement that has seen expressions from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street. And because this strain has refused to fully surrender its hopes for a liberated Egypt, it too has faced the wrath of the vengeful regime of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism. That was one of the major failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic and social inequality that began in 2011. That year, polls showed that

Many workers credited the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement for raising their consciousness about the unfairness of working in poverty for profitable corporations. In fact, fast food was the most unequal industry in the economy; Demos research calculated an over one-thousand-to-one average CEO-to-worker pay gap.

A CEMENT WALL A few years ago, two patients found themselves sharing a room in the palliative care unit of a hospital. Luis, in the bed next to the window, would talk to Daniel. Every day he would tell him, in luxuriant detail, what happened in the street. Mostly he narrated the adventures—seen from the window—of a family who lived near the hospital. The mother would often play with her children in the garden. He spoke naturally and with grace, although his voice was slurred from the chemotherapy. For Daniel, the last months of his life were rendered entertaining by his roommate. On those days when they were alone, without family or friends, Luis would say, “Shall I tell you what I see?” Daniel’s eyes would light up. And a recital would begin that might last hours. Months later, Luis passed away, and within a few days his bed was occupied by another patient. Daniel, excited by the thought that he would once again be able to hear the stories his friend had told him, asked his new companion to inform him about the children in their garden. The response stunned him: “There’s no garden here, just a cement wall.” Luis had used his imagination—his one remaining resource—to make up stories that would entertain Daniel. Using empathy, Luis had been capable of putting himself in his comrade’s shoes and successfully got him excited about something, helping him to overcome the suffering caused by his illness.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

What is this but a place?” he said. “Nothing more than a place. We’re both here in this place, occupying space. Everywhere is a place. All places share this quality. Is there any real difference between going to a gorgeous mountain resort with beautiful high thin waterfalls so delicate and ribbonlike they don't even splash when they hit bottom — waterfalls that plash; is this so different from sitting in a kitchen with bumpy linoleum and grease on the wall behind the stove across the street from a gravel pit? What are we talking about? Two places, that's all. There's nowhere you can go that isn't a place. So what's such a difference? If you can understand this idea, you'll never be unhappy. Think of the word 'place.' A sun deck with views of gorgeous mountains. A tiny dark kitchen. These share the most important of all things anything can share. They are places. The word 'place' applies in both cases. In this sense, how do we distinguish between them? How do we say one is better or worse than the other? They are equal in the most absolute of ways. Grasp this truth, sonny, and you'll never be sad.

Pause, reflect, admire, take heed of your ways—so these ancient tablets are always advising and exhorting us. One leaves the church marveling at the spacious days when unknown citizens could occupy so much room with their bones and confidently request so much attention for their virtues when we—behold how we jostle and skip and circumvent each other in the street, how sharply we cut corners, how nimbly we skip beneath motor cars. The mere process of keeping alive needs all our energy. We have no time, we were about to say, to think about life or death either, when suddenly we run against the enormous walls of St. Paul’s.

We laugh and jest at what we call “street boys or area boys” instead of thinking of what we could do, to get them occupied or send them to school and create work opportunities for them. We rather choose to build walls around our compounds, electrocuted fences to protect out interest and personal comfort. That only shows lack of Personal Responsibility.

Yet it is intrinsic to oligarchy that oligarchs are a small minority, a point graphically made in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan of ‘We are the 99 per cent’. But it is easier to identify what the 99 per cent are against than what they are for, an incoherence typical of the swell of unfocused public anger that followed the global financial crisis: anger with the finance industry and with the political failure to anticipate the crisis or respond effectively to it. Most countries ejected the governments—whether left or right—that had held office during the crisis. But that made no material difference to public policy towards the finance sector. In the absence of any intellectual framework for such policy beyond a call for ‘more regulation’, how could it? Perhaps

Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism. That was one of the major failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic and social inequality that began in 2011.

This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate unlike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power.

a series of well-founded critiques were marshalled from within the new left, prompted partly by the experiences of women in activist groups, who found their voices continued to be marginalised even in allegedly radical organisations. More hierarchical organisational forms, such as parties or traditional union organisations, continued to entrench the predominant patriarchal and sexist social relations prevalent in broader society. Considerable experimentation was therefore conducted to produce new organisational forms that could work against this social repression. This included the use of consensus decision-making and horizontal debating structures that would later come to worldwide fame with the Occupy Wall Street movement.35

It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again. An

US employment and income growth are now much more influenced by global conditions than in the past. Under these new circumstances, a distinction between domestic and foreign policy is analytically unproductive. For example, it risks categorizing movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as originating from domestic conditions rather than their interaction with global processes. p 4

One must ask why government is so reluctant to publish factual data on children in its care.  Unlike the single issue anti-Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s, the more recent “Occupy Wall Street” protesters on the streets and on college campuses nationwide have been protesting not only the larger issue of "corporate greed" and the "buying of Congress," but also resulting issues of a bleeding economy such as the rising cost of tuition, insurmountable student debt, biased economics classes and 15%  unemployment. There has never  been mass protesting  against profits outweighing the needs of the children and adults trapped in America’s failed Foster Care, Adoption and Prison systems  --  in part because each of these complex industries separate, isolate  and effectively censor and brainwash its victims under color of state confidentiality laws. 

As late as April 2009, the IMF estimated that we would incur nearly $2 trillion in direct costs saving the financial system, but at the end of 2013, our financial programs were projected to generate a positive return for the taxpayer of more than $150 billion, enough to fund federal cancer research at current levels for the next twenty-five years. But many Americans just remember the initial characterization of the financial rescue as a handout. Jenni LeCompte once sent me a clip of CNN’s Erin Burnett interviewing a young activist from Occupy Wall Street, asking him if he knew that the Wall Street bailouts had been profitable for taxpayers.

Que l'on partage ou non leurs aspirations, des mouvements tels que Podemos, les Indignés, Occupy Wall Street ou Nuit debout expriment en tout cas la détermination de leurs adhérents à réenchanter l'avenir plus qu'une quelconque résignation politique. Encore très minoritaires à l'échelle des classes moyennes mondiales, ils incarnent cependant un élan plus vaste et de plus en plus visible en Europe et dans certains États américains : celui des transitionnistes. Si leur diversité culturelle et leur parcimonie politique limitent encore leur convergence vers un dispositif d'action partagé et un processus de changement global, ils partagent déjà une aspiration sincère au changement global, ils partagent déjà une aspiration sincère au changement et une volonté d'en devenir les défricheurs. La force d'être jeunes et de ne rien avoir à perdre du futur incertain, leur niveau moyen d'éducation et de responsabilité, cette charge d'utopie enfin donnent à chacun d'eux la confiance et l'énergie pour tenter de subvertir le système économique mondial grâce à une multitude d'initiatives d'échelle limitée. Agriculture de proximité, entreprises solidaires, mobilités douces, énergies renouvelables, monnaies locales, recyclage : à force d'essaimer leurs expériences, les mouvements transitionnistes ont déjà converti toute une part des sociétés occidentales à l'économie circulaire, à la sobriété énergétique, aux produits biologiques, à l'écoresponsabilité, au recul de l'automobile en ville et, désormais, à celui de la consommation de viande. Sans chercher à le démontrer, ils rappellent avec le passé que les révolutions ont toujours procédé de minorités conscientes et agissantes. (p. 71)

fall of 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Interviews with these anticapitalism protesters reminded me of a scene in the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian

Obviously, I did have something to do with Occupy Wall Street.

The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice. Such rules challenge the emotional core of right-wing belief. And it is to this core that a free-wheeling candidate such as the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president in 2016, can appeal, saying, as he gazes upon throngs of supporters, “See all the passion.” We can approach that core, I came to see, through what I call a “deep story,” a story that feels as if it were true. As though I were seeing through Alice’s looking glass, the deep story was to lead me to focus on a site of long-simmering social conflict, one ignored by both the “Occupy Wall Street” left—who were looking to the 1 and the 99 percent within the private realm as a site of class conflict—and by the anti-government right, who think of differences of class and race as matters of personal character. The deep story was to take me to the shoulds and shouldn’ts of feeling, to the management of feeling, and to the core feelings stirred by charismatic leaders.

Today, although many such strikes continue—the Walmart strike of 2012, for example—many industrial work sites have been moved offshore to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Other forms of social conflict have arisen in different theaters. One theater animates the politics of the left. It focuses on conflict in the private sector between the very richest 1 percent and the rest of America. Occupy Wall Street has such a focus. It is not between owner and worker over a higher wage or shorter hours of work. It is between haves and have-nots, the ever-more-wealthy 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans. What feels unfair to Occupy activists is not simply unfair recompense for work (the multi-million dollar bonuses to hedge fund managers alongside the $8.25 hourly rate for Walmart clerks) but the absence of tax policies that could help restore America as a middle-class society. For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.” For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.

The climate crisis has been long framed as an issue of either techno-utopian tinkering, entrusting a few billionaires to save the day, or of collective self-sacrifices - us versus us. Have fewer children. Buy organic. Drive less. Amid all the carbon shaming, it's worth recalling Occupy Wall Street's most enduring slogan: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. If we didn't write ourselves subprime mortgages and we didn't on a whim decide to saddle ourselves with six figures worth of student debt, we certainly didn't wreck the planet. They did.

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

The idea for the Green New Deal began with a group called the Sunrise Movement, started by recent college graduate environmental activists who drew inspiration from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Some even say their roots can be traced back to Saul Alinsky, the gift to the right who keeps on giving. Alinsky, as you might remember, wrote a book back in 1971 called Rules for Radicals in which he cited Lucifer as the father of the radical movement. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both idolized Alinsky.

So, in a nutshell, here's how wokeness and capitalism shacked up : large corporations knocked up millennials. Together they birthed woke capitalism. And they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.

However, reality teaches us that democracy—like free markets—can be messy, especially when intense passions and partisanship are involved. Hence the episode we recounted at the start of this chapter, in which the Wikipedia article about the death of Meredith Kercher was hijacked by “haters” of Amanda Knox who were determined to make sure the page should assert her guilt and were prepared to eradicate any signs of dissension. The Kercher killing is not the only instance in which Wikipedia is embroiled in controversy—far from it. An article on the platform headed “Wikipedia: List of controversial issues” lists over 800 topics that “are constantly being re-edited in a circular manner, or are otherwise the focus of edit warring or article sanctions.” Organized under headings that include “Politics and economics,” “History,” “Science, biology, and health,” “Philosophy,” and “Media and culture,” they include everything from “Anarchism,” “Genocide denial,” “Occupy Wall Street,” and “Apollo moon landing hoax accusations” to “Hare Krishna,” “Chiropractic,” “SeaWorld,” and “Disco music.

a fast post-modernization: an explosion of consumerist hedonism, superficial sexual permissiveness, competitive individualism, etc. Those in power realized that such atomized social space is much more effective than direct state oppression against radical Leftist projects which rely on social solidarity: classes continue to exist “in themselves” but not “for themselves,” I see others from my class more as competitors than as members of a same group with solidary interests. Direct state oppression tends to unite opposition and promote organized forms of resistance, while in “postmodern” societies even extreme dissatisfaction assumes the form of chaotic revolts (from Occupy Wall Street to the gilets jaunes) which soon run out of steam, unable to reach the “Leninist” stage of an organized force with a clear program.

Walking downtown in a cool October drizzle, Justin and I were offered an umbrella by a middle-aged stranger in an olive bowler hat. “It’s extra,” he said, bowing down slightly. “I brought it because I knew someone would need it.” A palpable force seemed to be unifying the people of the city, the sudden camaraderie of solidarity. Arriving in the Financial District, we saw a tent city in Manhattan’s heart. A thousand people were gathered on the grass of Zuccotti Park, wielding cardboard signs with powerful reminders: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” and “We are the 99%.” Chatting with the campers, individuals who strongly reminded us of thru-hikers from the trail, we learned that this patchwork rally was a coordinated response to our country’s growing wealth gap.

An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street.

It wasn’t investigating my family history that put me on the lookout for cooperatives. I started looking because of stirrings I noticed as a reporter among veterans of the protests that began in 2011, such as Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s 15M movement. Once their uprisings simmered, the protesters had to figure out how to make a living in the economy they hadn’t yet transformed, and they started creating co-ops. Some were doing it with software—cooperative social media, cloud data, music streaming, digital currencies, gig markets, and more. But this generation was not all lost to the digital; others used cooperation to live by dirt and soil. The young radicals turned to the same kind of business that my buttoned-up, old-world, conservative grandfather did. Following them, I began following in my grandfather’s footsteps before I even knew it. Both

Occupy 2011 (or “Occupy Wall Street”) began after banks almost collapsed from their own investment gambling, and were “rewarded” with taxpayer-funded money.

army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected. Chapter 23, page 132. Trick #17 for Farming Humans is using stock markets to launder taxpayer backed, Fed created money to those who control the Fed. Chapter 25, page 136. Trick #18 for Farming Humans is the use of fake information to ensure that society never knows what is true and what is false. Elections, wars, headlines etc. Chapter 26, page 141. Trick #19 for Farming Humans is stimulation and distraction. This emotional hacking of humans is Trick #19 for Farming Humans. See Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking Book by Christopher J. Hadnagy Trick #20 for Farming Humans is the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and 83 media regulations, including requirement for “honest, equitable and balanced”. Chapter 28, page 153. Trick #21 for Farming Humans is governments as handmaidens to corporations, not people. Chapter 29, page 157. Trick #22 for Farming Humans is in the invisible connections between government, professionals and corporations. Chapter 31, page 162. Laws, lobby groups, lawyers. Trick #23 for Farming Humans is a militarized police used to serve and protect power instead of people. Chapter 32, page 170. World Trade Organization, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, etc. Trick #24 for Farming Humans is virtually zero enforcement of crime above a certain level of money or power. Invisible friends and powerful people cannot be prosecuted. Chapter 33, page 175. Trick #25 for Farming Humans is cooking the financial books. Chapter 34, page 180. Valeant Pharmaceutical, IFRS vs GAP accounting standards, audit numbers rigged. Trick #26 for Farming Humans is printing infinite money to exchange for finite goods…”let me handle that for you.” Chapter 35, page 184. Trick #27 for Farming Humans is public servants spying on the public, and not on the public servants. Chapter 36, page 188.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity.

The people at Occupy Wall Street were the return of the Levellers and Diggers, lifted straight out of the seventeenth century

the new york headquarters of the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton occupy ten floors of a sleek black office tower that stands in a grove of skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan. Founded in 1931 by a pair of blue-blooded attorneys who defected from a venerable Wall Street firm, Debevoise became venerable itself, expanding, over the decades, into a global juggernaut with eight hundred lawyers, a roster of blue-chip clients, and nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. The midtown offices bear no trace of the oak-and-leather origins of the firm. Instead, they are decorated in the banal tones of any contemporary corporate office, with carpeted hallways, fishbowl conference rooms, and standing desks. In the twentieth century, power announced itself. In the twenty-first, the surest way to spot real power is by its understatement.

We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people. White economic inequality, for instance, soared to the point that the so-called “99 percenters” occupied Wall Street in 2011, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ran a popular presidential campaign against the “billionaire class” in 2016.

great institution and are helping to maintain it to share our prosperity.” On January 5, 2012, 98 years later, embittered individuals who identified with the Occupy Wall Street movement were in the 111th day of a protest that began in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. These protestors were expressing what they perceived as economic unfairness and inequality resulting from corporate greed. The group’s mantra, “We are the 99 percent,” reflected cynicism and distrust for business, financial, and governmental systems that they viewed as sacrificing the interest of the country’s 99 percent in favor of the wealthiest 1 percent. Where had we come in a century? Dov Seidman, founder, chairman, and CEO of LRN, a company that helps businesses develop and maintain effective corporate governance, suggests, “This crisis of trust in our basic institutions is so troubling precisely because the lack of trust is in so many cases well deserved. Broken promises, obfuscation, spin, concealment, all have created a suspicion—often unfortunately true—

Lord, when the alarm clock, stove clock, and time clock demand my presence, When the pace of life is hectic, When I wish there were six more hours in a day, When the traffic light is stuck on red And my family’s schedule demands I be in three places at one time, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when people expect too much of me, When the boss has forgotten about the eight-hour day, When I am constantly at others’ beck and call, When the cell phone, Twitter, fax, and email all go off at once And I begin to hate the human race, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when work occupies all my waking hours, When television commercials say I must have more, When my neighbors flaunt their newest toys, When alcoholic does not apply but workaholic does And I decide to go to the office on Sunday to catch up, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, when money means more than people, When I read The Wall Street Journal more than my Bible, When overtime becomes my primetime, When promotions and pay hikes are my ultimate goals And looking out for number one has become my slogan in life, May I take time to rest, Lord. Lord, may I refocus my life on you. May I restore my thoughts in your Word. May I refresh my schedule by meditating on all your blessings. May I relax my activity every week to enjoy the life you gave me. May I take time to rest, Lord.